Manufacturing processes invariably result in material waste for a variety of reasons, such as imperfections in raw materials and errors made during production. Material waste has increasingly become an economic burden for manufacturers of wood products, such as doors and windows. In the past, wood waste from doors, cardboard, particleboard, and wood pallets was either disposed of in landfills or burned. The steady increase in fees for landfill disposal and increasingly stringent air-quality regulations have made traditional methods of waste disposal problematic for manufacturers of wood products.
Conventional alternatives to landfill disposal and burning are inadequate. One alternative is to place any one of a variety of pollution-control devices in the exhaust path of a wood-burning plant. However, the cost of such devices is expensive, and for small manufacturers, these expenses can quickly become cost-prohibitive. The cost of burning waste can also include governmental permit fees, as well as the cost of ensuring compliance with environmental regulations.
An alternative to disposing of the waste is to find another market for the waste material. One potential market is animal bedding. However, animal bedding requires generally homogenous and nontoxic material. Wood waste from manufacturing processes can often include ferrous materials and painted products, which can be harmful to animals. Thus, animal bedding is often not an adequate solution. Another potential market is fill material for construction sites. The construction industry utilizes fill for a variety of purposes, such as raising elevations. However, the demand for fill material is inconsistent, which means that manufacturers would be forced to keep an inventory of waste when there is no adequate demand. Keeping any sort of inventory is generally expensive, and thus, this option does not offer sufficient economic advantages over disposal.
Another alternative to disposing of wood waste is to utilize the wood waste to manufacture composite components. Various methods for utilizing wood waste to make certain wood-based composite materials, such as certain particleboards and fiberboards, is well known in the art. However, the equipment currently available to manufacture such composite materials is relatively expensive, and therefore is cost-prohibitive for most small and specialty manufacturers. Moreover, currently-available wood extrusion processes require generally uniform—that is, size, shape, weight, moisture content, and material type—raw materials. Often, wood waste from manufacturing processes is not uniform. Moreover, the product produced by such conventional methods typically has a density that is non-uniform.